Are Americans leaving small towns like towns of Aplalachia coal country?

35 comments

1. Yes, they are. This isn’t anything that new, especially for that region.

2. Yeah, the coal industry is dying.

3. Yes and those that stay are having kids below the replacement rate increasing decline.

4. Peter Santenello?

5. Only for the last 100 years or more.

6. That sounds about right, yes. If a place doesn’t give you access to the career or level of education you want, why would you stay there?

7. I was born and raised in Eastern Kentucky. Right in the heart of Appalachia and coal country.

   I left as soon as I graduated highschool and so did like 90% of my classmates. I love the land and the unique culture. But there just is no future there, especially not a prosperous one.

8. Depends. I live on the NE fringes of this beautiful area. Much of the area thrives in certain categories and areas while others are a shell of what it once was. Little bit of info here……….. Appalachia had a population of 26.3 million in 2021, a 2.9% increase – or almost 745,000 more residents – than it had in mid-2010. Though two subregions have experienced growth, most of the Region has lost population and its overall growth is slower than the national average of 7.3%Appalachia had a population of 26.3 million in 2021, a 2.9% increase – or almost 745,000 more residents – than it had in mid-2010. Though two subregions have experienced growth, most of the Region has lost population and its overall growth is slower than the national average of 7.3%https://www.arc.gov/about-the-appalachian-region/the-chartbook/appalachias-population/#:~:text=Appalachia%20had%20a%20population%20of,the%20national%20average%20of%207.3%25.

9. Yes, overall especially in Appalachia.

   No when it comes to small New England towns. Some are growing substantially. But that said a lot of small New England towns are still dying.

   It really depends on the specific town.

10. You’re asking this in 2023?

11. A lot of people were moving out of the region I moved to NYC from, but on nowhere near the scale shown in the video you probably saw that sent you here.

12. It been a common thing for decades. Kids leave for jobs and education, but often come back to raise their family.

    In regions where there’s not good schools or any jobs? They don’t go back as often.

13. I grew up in WV. My hometown has been shrinking since it peaked in 1880. Still busy when my grandparents were young in the pre WW2 era, but a lot of the Boomers who could leave did when they finished school, and it’s just been on a slow, steady decline for 60-70 years.

14. It’s also the case for large portions of the midwest.

    It’s becoming a problem where some townships barely have enough people to even maintain a volunteer fire dept, and school districts can be as large as counties.

    A third of the counties in Illinois and half the counties in Iowa have less than 20k people.

15. Oh my family ain’t leaving the rural mountains in Appalachia. My lines trace back for hundreds of years.

    Out of my 12 cousins in rural Kentucky, only 2 have moved out of the area. One still being in Kentucky and the other went to South Carolina. Other than that, they’re either working at WalMart, a coal mine or collecting a disability check.

16. A lot of these small towns exist because of industries – factories, mines, etc

    When the coal mine in your small Appalachian town shuts down you have to move to find work.

    Terms like “the rust belt” were coined because these small industrial town’s factories shut down and were left to rust, and the population left behind are stuck working low income jobs in deteriorating communities.

17. Only for 100+ years

18. I saw the video ([Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9lSZlDJAC0) for those interested. Highly recommended.) you’re talking about and it’s pretty much true. There just aren’t any real opportunities for young people. If you watch some of the later videos in the series, a pretty consistent theme is that most of the miners don’t want their children to end up going into the mines like they did because it ruins your health. The only real choice for a better life is to leave.

    It’s a very economically depressed area and has been so for decades. Not really sure what the answer is, to be honest.

19. My hometown isn’t in coal country, but it is in Appalachia (southwest Virginia mountain town). I guess I’d call it semi-rural, in the sense that some people call it rural, but it’s not like some *really* rural places either. It was a railroad town, then manufacturing when the railroad didn’t need it anymore (the switch from coal/steam to diesel trains meant not needing to stop at the water tower anymore). Furniture, trucks, and socks. Anyway, it was vibrant and booming in 1910 and felt nearly dead by 2000. The population peaked in 1960 and has slowly declined since then. In absolute numbers it’s only about 1,000 less people than in 1960, which doesn’t sound like much, but when the peak population was just over 10k and it’s a 10% decline that’s noticeable.

    It is actually starting to revitalize a bit though. It’s within 20-40 minutes of two state universities (Virginia Tech and Radford University), and as Virginia Tech expands and Blacksburg (where it’s located) gets more expensive, people are starting to look out towards my hometown which is still pretty cheap (there are currently 4-bedroom houses in okay condition listed for $135k or so). Some other good things going on with town projects and stuff. It’s close to the interstate and doesn’t have the isolation and lack of service availability that some more truly rural communities have (like, we had easy access to cable internet even back in the early 2000s), so it’s a good candidate for revitalization. But it’s still hard to draw people there without any big opportunities to offer.

20. Quite. I’m one of the ones who left and was happy to do so.

21. It’s very common in many areas of the country. Without job opportunities, there’s not a lot of incentive for most young people to stay in rural/small communities. Michigan’s rural areas have been bleeding people for decades. COVID and work from home has slowed that trend and some areas have even gained population. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next 10 years as cities continue to be more and more expensive to live and the economy adapts to less people being in the office.

22. Coal is a dangerous job and not really a prosperous one to begin with, and mining has had harmful ecological impacts. Other light manufacturing has moved out as well.

    Some Appalachian towns are growing and more prosperous, especially those focused on tourism. This includes parts of Tennessee and North Carolina and southern Virginia including areas around Damascus, Boone, Asheville and Knoxville metros.

23. In 1982 I moved away Kanawha County West Virginia. The population was 250,000. The population today is about 190,000. A lot of the smaller counties have shrunk even more. I recently watched a documentary with towns that have just about completely emptied in the last 10 years.

24. I grew up and am unfortunately still in, Ohio. We have lots of these small towns here. My home town looks like an abandoned movie lot, and has my whole life.

    At the turn of the *last* last century, (the late 1900’s) it was a nice little town. Even had a trolley car. By the time I was born, all that was gone by a generation.

    Lots of coal, fracking, and other blue collar work abounds in certain spots, but the mentality and the economy of the peoples are, in my experience, not really what one wants to live and thrive in.

    No economy, no work, poor education, environment socially and environmentally. (In no small part to the recent train derailment here in East Palestine, arguably another such town).

    Lots of little empty lots posing as towns, remnants of the first folks who came here with nothing and expected much more than we got.

25. Born and raised in PA’s Coal Region. Can confirm that the towns there are experiencing a massive brain drain as people with the means or education to do so are generally getting out of Dodge. There’s not much in the way of opportunity and many town governments are essentially an old boys’ club. My wife and I moved out two years ago and we’ll never move back.

26. The remote worker exodus from cities to small towns is true but far overstated in media. It does not cancel out the flight from small towns.

    And remote workers are heading to “postcard towns,” not Appalachia.

    There are whole parts of America just drying up, and life is hard below the poverty line.

    Don’t really see political leadership from either side helping.

27. Yes. This is happening all over the country and has been a trend for nearly a century. But it’s uneven. A lot of small times die out while others in closer proximity to large cities will maintain or grow. And then still others grow and merge with other large cities. So it’s a constant cycle of growth, decay, and sometimes rebirth.

28. The proportion of the population that lives in rural counties is decreasing all over the country, but the rate it’s happening is very region specific. Towns that are both geographically isolated and built around one or a small numbers of industries–like Appalachia–are shrinking the fastest, while towns that are better connected to the surrounding area and have a few more career options will linger for a long time.

    Anecdotally, my own small town has actually grown a bit in the last 20 years. But a) the rate of growth is not that impressive compared to the population increase of the rest of the state, country, and world, and b) it’s culturally similar to a suburb, just gotta drive through 20 miles of farmland instead of 20 minutes of residential sprawl to make it to a small city with a few jobs and amenities worth commuting for

29. My family – distant – is from a small town in East Tennessee on the KY/TN stateline. Everyone is either dead or has moved away.

30. They have been for generations. My grandma grew up in west Virginia but moved to Ohio in the 60s for better opportunities. My family has been here ever since.

31. Considering a large chunk of that also intersects with the Rust Belt, yes. There’s just not much left in the region for people anymore, and a lot of people don’t want to work the same jobs as our parents and grandparents in mines and factories.

32. 99% of rural areas in the US are losing population if they’re not being integrated into a city/suburb or experiencing a resource boom.

33. Yes, the towns grew in popularity because of the coal. Not because it was prosperous, but because men were desperate to feed themselves and their families.

    And it mostly grew from “nothing” to “town” size – not “town” to “city” size.

    Thankfully coal mining like that disappeared, and got replaced with factory labor.

    A lot of factories that provided work and REAL prosperity to locals shut down, starting in the 70s and continuing through the 90s.

    People started to leave.

    Then the whole 2008 economic collapse happened.

    And most areas really didn’t recover.

    Younger people usually move to cities – partially for college, and partially for work opportunity. Plus there’s more “entertainment”. There aren’t opportunities in small towns anymore.

    Age diversity is starting to get “better” in my area, because of remote work, and because HCOL (high cost of living) areas are getting too expensive for younger people to sustain themselves

34. The reason we left wv is because there were no good paying jobs there. I do miss home though.

35. there’s a reason west virginia has the highest high school graduation rate in the country. there’s *literally* no future there